Friday, 3 February 2012

Music Box Toy with Elementary Cellular Automata

This demonstration uses a simple and novel mapping of elementary cellular automata (CA) to single-voice musical sequences. The mapping is created by evolving a small CA through all its possible initial conditions for a number of generations, converting the cells to decimals and storing them in a table. This table is visualized using Mathematica's built-in function ArrayPlot with starting conditions assigned vertically and generations evolving horizontally.

There are 3 experimental generative sound pieces I made for the demo. You'll have to download the demo from their website to hear them. Below are the example snapshots of the setup for each piece :

Some info about Wolfram Demonstrations Project from their About Page :

Conceived by Mathematica creator and scientist Stephen Wolfram as a way to bring computational exploration to the widest possible audience, the Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art, finance, and a remarkable range of other fields.

Each is reviewed and edited by experts for content, clarity, presentation, quality, and reliability.

All Demonstrations run freely on any standard Windows, Mac, or Linux computer. In fact, you do not even need Mathematica. You can interact with any Demonstration using the free Wolfram CDF Player—for most platforms this happens right in your web browser. If you have Mathematica you can also experiment and modify the code yourself.

For a lot more info on the Wolfram Demonstrations Project please see their about page

about noyzelab

David Burraston is an award-winning artist/scientist working in the areas of technology and electronic music since the late 1970s. His experimental arts practice encompasses field recording, landscape-scale sound art, chaos/complexity, sound synthesis and electronic music. He performs, lectures, conducts workshops and creates art installations in Regional NSW and around the world. David also designs and builds sound synthesizers based on his theories of chaos/complexity. In 2014 he independently published the legendary SYROBONKERS!, the most technical and in-depth interview ever given by Aphex Twin.